Background/motivation: Percutaneous femoropopliteal artery intervention moves towards
personalised therapy, which requires design of unique lesion-specific stents. However, to date,
not much progress has been made in the development of personalised stents. Objective: This
paper aims to design personalised nitinol stents for femoropopliteal arteries based on medical
imaging of patients and advanced computational mechanics, which is the first attempt to the
authors’ best knowledge. Methods: The design process is based on three objectives: (i)
achieving the healthy lumen area; (ii) reducing the stress in the media layer; (iii) improving
the lumen shape after stenting. The design parameters include the strut width and thickness,
the crown length, the nominal radius and the number of strut units per crown. Using
representative unit-cell models, the effects of the five geometric parameters on the stent
performance are investigated thoroughly with numerical simulations. Then, design protocols,
especially for the circumferentially varying strut size and the oval stent shape, are developed
and fully evaluated for an asymmetric stenosis. Results: Using the design protocols, full
personalised stents are designed for arteries with diffuse and focal plaques, based on medical
imaging of patients. The personalised stent designs provide a double lumen gain, a reduced
stress in the media layer and an improved lumen shape compared to a commercial stent.
Conclusions: The suggested protocols prove their high effectiveness in design of personalised
stents, and the suggested approach can be applied to development of personalised therapies
involving the use of stent technology including percutaneous coronary artery intervention,
transcatheter aortic valve implantation, endovascular aneurysm repair and ureteric stenting.
Funding
Smart Peripheral Stents for the Lower Extremity - Design, Manufacturing and Evaluation
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/